Using a keyboard shortcut of Win+L to quickly lock your computer is already fairly comprehensive to me but to unlock, I have to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up the login window, and that doesn’t look cool to me. I need something cooler than that.

Password Booster Screen Lock is a free tool that lets you to quickly lock and unlock your computer using a USB drive. Easily put, unplugging your USB drive from your computer immediately locks your session, and plugging it back in automatically unlocks it without even putting in your password. Sounds cool, doesn’t it?

To start,

Second, register an USB drive with the program. To do so, double click the tool from System Tray, which opens the main configuration window.

Click on Setup button, and insert your USB drive. The Screen Locker will automatically finds it and get it registered.

Now, it’s ready to play the fancy part. Unplugging the registered USB drive will immediately locks your current Windows session.

And plugging it back you automatically unlocks the session to the desktop without bothering typing in the password.

You can also easily control the Screen Lock by simply right-clicking its icon in the system tray that will toggle to enable/disable the tool from running.

The Screen Locks only works on Vista and above, so it doesn’t work on those XP machines. You can pretty much use any kinds of USB drives to perform this locking task. It uses the unique serial number of the USB flash drive that is stored inside the device firmware along with an additional file it puts on the drive. To enhance the security, Screen Lock regenerates this additional file every 2 days.

Now, I have to admit that this is cooler than hitting a Win+L keyboard shortcut and later on a Ctrl+Alt+Del.